Did Valve Just Accidentally Announce Half-Life 3?

So let's recap: a modder believes he has uncovered Valve's soft-launch of the Source 2 game engine; a piece of software that would surely be the foundation for making Valve's next big games: Left 4 Dead 2 and the long-awaited Half-Life 3.

Source is the name of Valve's games engine, it's used to build and then run the games that Valve makes. It's currently used in Portal, Half-Life 2 and Valve's biggest game, DOTA 2.

The discovery was made after Steam quietly unveiled an entirely new set of development tools for their biggest game, DOTA 2.

It was noted that the development tools had very high system requirements with both a 64-bit processor and Direct X 11 support being compulsory.

Whilst that in itself was odd, modder RoyAwesome decided to dig deeper and discovered that Valve had essentially re-built DOTA 2 as an entirely new game.

Having made this discovery RoyAwesome immediately headed to reddit to share his discovery saying.

"Everything in this package is a new game. It's all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2. That's why Hammer is different. That's why the console is different."

"Guys. Valve just soft launched the entire Source 2 engine."

With many asking for proof Roy went on to confirm that "everything that would share a name with Source is named '...2'. That's 'engine2.dll', 'vconsole2.exe', 'vphysics2.dll'."

While Valve have been notoriously quiet about Half Life 3 if this turns out to be true it would be the biggest development yet.

At the very least what it does mean is that Valve is actively working on new games, whether or not that would be Half Life 3 remains to be seen.

It would certainly fit in with Valve's approach to Half Life 2. Originally launched on PC, Valve was then able to re-launch the game on Xbox 360 and PS3 as both consoles could finally match the game's visual requirements.

With this ethos it would make sense that Valve waited until the next-gen consoles were well established so they could again launch Half Life 3 on PS4, Xbox One and PC at the same time.